We ceremoniously honor today the 1.4 million Americans who died fighting for a country most would hardly recognize if resurrected from the grave. We cherish their service and sacrifice while sacrificing much of what they fought for. We should do better.

Colorado Regent Chance Hill – a lawyer, scholar, and veteran of the Navy and CIA – questioned in social media whether we properly respect the sacrifices of those who die for us.

“Despite some ceremonies and celebrations to mark this weekend’s significance, I sometimes fear that we have more fundamentally dishonored their sacrifice,” Hill wrote, explaining he speaks only in a personal capacity. “After all, they engaged in battles against despotism and socialism by air, land, and sea for love of country and to protect our liberty. Yet, by permitting our government to gradually assume a role that strays so far from our founding ideals, have we not subverted the conception of America for which they fought?”

Perhaps we have. Most of the 1.4 million would not have predicted a day when American candidates for national office would openly run on socialist platforms with crowds cheering them on.

Some died fighting for oil, hoping for a day their country would celebrate energy independence. If they lived today, they would see open defiance – by major figures in public office – of domestic oil and gas production. They would see mainstream politicians promising to outlaw the fuels that power war machines that defend the country.

Today, men and women who died to keep socialist tyrants at bay would see seven of 10 surveyed millennials eager to put a socialist in the White House.

Deceased World War I combatants died as the flu began killing 675,000 Americans in one year – 0.7% of the U.S. population. They would see their country paralyzed today for a virus on track to kill 0.03% of the population as cancer and heart disease kill a percentage nearly 14 times greater.

They would find the First Amendment in tatters, with houses of worship closed by the force of government authorities. They would see businesses and lives ruined by authoritative dictates. They would hear of property owners forced to provide free housing for people with full incomes and government funds wired to their bank accounts.

If the fallen returned today, they would hear of a former state trooper handcuffed in a Colorado park for tossing a ball to his six-year-old daughter – an apparent violation of orders to stay home. They would read of ministers arrested for preaching, and violent convicts released because of the virus.

They would see experts on TV changing their minds at whim to suit changing agendas. The virus threatens us barely at all. Don’t wear masks and look like drama queens. Oh, wait, the virus is a crisis of biblical proportions requiring central command and control. The people must wear masks.

The fallen would hear a strange authoritative narrative that says don’t think for yourself; obey the authorities and experts no matter how much they get wrong.

They would see their country mortgaging its future with $25 trillion in debt and growing, with people clamoring for more government largesse and control of their lives.

Seeing all of this, they would surely wonder what went wrong.

Nineteenth-century French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville warned of a soft tyranny resulting from excessive reliance on government – a condition that “makes the exercise of free choice less useful and rarer, restricts the activity of free will within a narrower company, and little by little robs each citizen of the proper use of his own faculties.”

We should pray for and venerate our heroic fallen who lost their lives so we could live free. Yet, we can do more. We should work to take back, cherish, and protect the way of life they died to defend. It is the least we could do to honor them properly.